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In timely and incisive analysis, our experts parse the latest development news and devise practical solutions to new and emerging challenges. Our events convene the top thinkers and doers in global development.

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3.5 million children around the world are refugees, many with little or no access to schooling. That means we won’t come anywhere near our targets for the fourth Sustainable Development Goal—quality education for all—unless we can address the refugee crisis. Save the Children International president Helle Thorning-Schmidt joins the CGD podcast to discuss how donor countries can help.

RISE is a large scale, multi-country research programme developed to answer the question: “How can education systems be reformed to deliver better learning for all?” The objective of this year’s conference is to bring together high profile academics and policy makers to discuss the RISE research agenda. The conference features a range of invited and contributed talks and panels, as well as three sessions focused on our six Country Research Teams (CRTs), including the announcement of our two newest CRTs. The RISE Programme is a collaboration between the Center for Global Development in Washington DC, the Blavatnik School of Government, University of Oxford, and Oxford Policy Management in Oxford, UK, and our CRTs include Tanzania, India, Pakistan, and Vietnam, with two further countries to be announced shortly.

Public-private partnerships (PPPs) in education that combine public finance to provide free or subsidized access to privately delivered education are expanding in many developing countries, either to increase access where government capacity is limited or to improve learning outcomes—often with limited evidence on their success. This panel brings together experts from the policy and research spheres to review what we know about the design of effective partnerships, the hazards to be avoided, and the frontiers for new research.

Building on the momentum of last year’s report of the International Commission on Financing Global Education Opportunity, chaired by former UK Prime Minister Gordon Brown, and the launch of the Education Cannot Wait Fund, incubated at UNICEF, to address learning needs in humanitarian emergencies, this event discusses how current investment can be leveraged and increased to ensure that every child can access their right to a quality education.

The Trump administration's signature policy proposal to control immigration more tightly has been the most contentious issue of the early days of this presidency. In this podcast we seek to add some facts to the debate.

The immigration ban of citizens from seven Muslim-majority nations (a federal judge has since ordered an emergency stay) negatively impacts students, universities, and the US economy. This chart compares the growth in the international student body with a period of large cuts to state funds.

The immigration ban of citizens from seven Muslim-majority nations (a federal judge has since ordered an emergency stay) negatively impacts students, universities, and the US economy. This chart indicates the most popular majors among students from these seven countries.

The immigration ban of citizens from seven Muslim-majority nations (a federal judge has since ordered an emergency stay) negatively impacts students, universities, and the US economy. This chart indicates the number of student visas issued over the past decade for the seven affected countries.

Changing the law is a good step, but changing norms is the real challenge. Former president of Malawi Joyce Banda and FGM survivor Kakenya Ntaiya offer effective ways to address cultural practices that harm young girls.

CGD's Bill Savedoff and Justin Sandefur (who leads our education research through the RISE project) discuss their contributions to and assessment of the education Commission's Learning Generation report.

The PISA is a standardized test administered to 15-year-olds in dozens of countries every three years, most recently in 2012. Rich kids do better on PISA, so much so that rich kids in poorer countries score just as well their counterparts in rich countries. The strength of that relationship between wealth and scores varies a lot though across countries.

Countries with high inequality have very big gaps in test scores between rich and poor kids. The correlation between the Gini coefficient of income inequality (on the horizontal axis) and the measure of intergenerational immobility (i.e., how well parental wealth predicts test scores, on the vertical axis) is high (about 0.71 for reading and 0.75 for math) and highly statistically significant.

Countries with high inequality have very big gaps in test scores between rich and poor kids. The correlation between the Gini coefficient of income inequality (on the horizontal axis) and the measure of intergenerational immobility (i.e., how well parental wealth predicts test scores, on the vertical axis) is high (about 0.71 for reading and 0.75 for math) and highly statistically significant.

The last decade has seen considerable progress enrolling children in schools worldwide: today most people live in countries on track to meet the Millennium Development Goal of 100% primary completion by 2015. Sadly, enrollment doesn’t necessarily equal learning. A new report by the CGD Study Group on Measuring Learning Outcomes shows a shockingly wide gap between education inputs and learning outcomes. The report, Schooling is Not Education: Using Assessment to Change the Politics of Non-Learning, finds the learning crisis reflects systemic issues in education sectors worldwide.

I'm joined this week by Ayah Mahgoub, a program coordinator here at the Center for Global Development who works on issues related to the effectiveness of foreign aid. Along with Nancy Birdsall and Bill Savedoff, Ayah is working on designing a new form of development assistance called Cash on Delivery Aid that would pay for progress on specific development outcomes.

Nancy summed up the basic idea of the Cash on Delivery approach on a Wonkcast last month—read that post or go here for a short introduction to the idea of COD Aid. While discussions are underway to develop COD aid mechanisms for a number of sectors (including water and health), the initial application is in education. In this sector, a Cash on Delivery contract would pay recipient governments a fixed amount for each additional student who completes primary school and take a standardized test. Ayah is helping to match aid donors and recipient governments who are interested in supporting a pilot of this innovative approach. I asked Ayah to tell us about the countries where the first COD Aid programs might happen: Malawi, Ethiopia, and Liberia.